Eugène Brands, Portrait Karel Appel, 1959, Gouache, 65 x 71 cm. Size without frame: 45 x 50 cm

An extraordinary work by the Eugène Brands. A portrait of fellow artist Karel Appel from 1959.

Brands is an idiosyncratic artist who was briefly part of the Cobra movement. But he eventually developed into its poetic counterpart. Karel Appel characterised Brands' works as "Meditative Spaces".

In 1948, he joined the Dutch Experimental group REFLEX, which later,in terms of a number of artists, evolved into CoBrA. His meeting with Willem Sandberg, former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, leads to the exhibition in which CoBrA presents itself in the Netherlands for the first time in 1949. Brands leaves CoBrA a year after its founding in 1949 to retreat to his studio for the next 10 years and draw inspiration from 'the world of the child'. He discovers a special technique for this, namely oil paint on paper.

From 1967, he taught Free Painting at the Royal Academy of Modern Art and Design in 's-Hertogenbosch, among other things. Brands has had numerous one-man exhibitions at home and abroad. Important retrospective exhibitions were in 1969 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1988 at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, in 1990 at the Beyerd in Breda, and in 1997 and 2001 at the CoBrA Museum of Modern Art in Amstelveen.

Eugène Brands lived and worked in Amsterdam, until he moved into a summer residence in Nunspeet on the Hoge Veluwe in 1974. There in the silence of nature, he felt the mystery of the cosmos more strongly than ever. In the beauty, the colours of both crocuses and violets and the reflection of the pond in the garden, the mystery is locked up for him.

In 1993, Brands decided to stop painting on canvas. It has become too physically demanding for him. After that time, he limits himself to his beloved gouaches on paper, as the technique of gouache lends itself best to the freedom he wants to achieve.